Well here it is – my first blog. Knowledge Matters™ has been a long time in gestation. I first thought of the name 12 months or so ago. I then looked for a suitable medium and after fiddling with Microsoft FrontPage, Expression Web and SharePoint for a couple of months, I tried Blogger and Moveable Type, before settling on Drupal. But I digress.

Why Knowledge Matters™? I have always privileged formal education, while at the same recognising there is no substitute for experience, and I truly believe knowledge matters in everything we do. Knowledge Matters™ is a precise enough name to capture my interest in knowledge management, and loose enough for me to write on just about anything providing I keep a knowledge theme. That said I do intend to write with some thematic structure, and I don’t intend to blog my holidays and social activities!

So what is my thematic structure? Well I am going to write about knowledge work, knowledge productivity™, and knowledge management. I will define each of these in coming blogs. My current interest is network analysis and how it might be used as a project management tool to picture knowledge and understand risks. I have been careful to use the term ‘network analysis’ rather than ‘social network analysis’, ‘organisational network analysis’ or ‘value network analysis’, so there is at least four blogs around this theme alone. I am also writing a doctorate in and around these themes so I explore ideas in this medium. I hope your contributions will challenge and inspire me!

And finally I have a passionate interest in Celtic music, specifically bagpipes and bagpipe music. There is a dying oral tradition associated with learning bagpipes, and for me this decay matters. Every day I see humanity make huge forward steps, but are we as individuals any cleverer? What knowledge are we losing? Does this knowledge loss matter? I think it does, so from time to time I will blog on these topics, and therefore I seek your indulgence if you visit this blog for other reasons.

I hope you now understand what I am trying to achieve and your appetite is sufficiently whet for you to visit again. You now have the knowledge to make that decision, so in a small way I have shown you why knowledge matters.

Regards, Graham.